Chav takes a plane (I)

Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting extracts from my forthcoming new book, this time a novel and provisionally titled “Chav takes a plane”. Feedback welcome!

Birdwatching

In the free paper he found on the train Chav read about the case of a shy young man whose online dating profile had been hijacked now for several months. Neither the site administrators nor the customer himself had been able to modify his data or the brief description of his attributes, nor had they been able to remove the profile with its photos and personal information, phone number included. Whenever they thought they’d cleared it, the hacker updated it again, with a new, more complex cipher for his code-hungry opponents to delight in.

Soon after it all began the bashful birdwatcher victim of cyberantics had consulted his confidante in the filing department, who, looking up at him sheepishly through her owl’s glasses, had counselled him to get a new phone or block unknown callers so that he would no longer be molested by all the lewd, suggestive calls, not to mention the tantalising photos and brazen videoclips. He thought about doing as she suggested and also considered telling her he had, even if he hadn’t.

Such popular response was to the hacker’s simple three-word interrogation planted for ever more on the guy’s internet profile: “Fancy a shag?” The hundreds of contacts the guy was said to have received seemed a bit exaggerated to Chav because most women specify they’re not interested in one-night stands. Possibly the same ones that say they don’t read romances and then look at you horrified as if you had just accused them of burning ants with a magnifying glass. Maybe it all depends on who with. Chav looked again at the photo of the muscular martyr: dark hair, sunglasses, with a neatly-trimmed moustache hovering cockily above sensual lips and a wry, saucy grin.